A blog about designing, creating, and painting wooden model soldiers for wargaming. These models are sometimes known as "craftees". To me, they are wooden warriors.

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Two Games Over the Weekend

I ran two games this past weekend, one was the Balin's Tomb Lord of the Rings miniatures game, and the second was a playtest for a tabletop fantasy role-playing game I've been working on. Only two pictures of the later I'm sorry to say, but I took quite a few of the Balin's Tomb game.

Balin's Tomb
I used the by the book GW Strategy Battle Game rules for this one, with my Balin's Tomb set up that I already posted pictures of before. Standard winning conditions for the Good side, last 12 turns without Frodo being killed or any 5 Fellowship members being killed. The rules, and this scenario, are pretty biased in favor of the Good side, so I thought they would probably win, I just wanted to see if the board I was using was too big for the game.

Turned out that three players showed up to the game store to play so I played the Evil side and each player took a set of heroes to play. This turned out to be a very good thing and when I run this at a convention I'm going to make sure to play the Evil side and have all the players play the heroes. It was just more fun for them. And now the pics of the game.

Starting point for the Fellowship, as close as I could get it out of the movie.

At the start of the first turn of the game. One unit of goblins with a goblin leader (I used an orc figure so it was easy to tell who the leader was in the chaos of the melee to come) has made its way through the door. This is the only thing I think I will change. I gave the Good side priority (initiative) like the rules say to do for the first turn, but I'm going to give the evil side priority next time I run the game. It will allow the goblins to put more immediate pressure on the heroes, and this is a good thing.

Two goblin units in now, this is the end of the second turn. You can see that the Fellowship are setting up for a bottle neck to the goblin's left of Balin's tomb to try and limit the rushing advance. It actually worked pretty well.

Third turn. All three goblin units on the board at this point. Basically it's a contest of exchanged missile fire between Legolas and Aragorn shooting arrows and a lot of goblins shooting arrows. Every now and then Gandalf would cast a spell as well.

The big boy makes his entrance and you can see we've got some melee's going on now. All forces are on the board at this point.

The cave troll makes a go of moving around the open side of the tomb to get to Gandalf and the hobbits on the other side.

He made the turn and was heading for home but the Fellowship won priority and Gimli moved into melee with the cave troll to stop his advance. You can see Aragorn and Boromir also fighting in a ferocious melee, greatly outnumbered.

Gimli has managed to keep pinning the cave troll and you can see that the hobbits have made their way to the stairs, with Gandalf and Legolas covering their retreat.

Evil won priority for this turn and the cave troll tried to finish off Gimli with one goblin each charging in to occupy Boromir and Aragorn, with a rush of three getting to Gandalf. Nail biting time!

But, Gimli killed the cave troll, Gandalf survived, and eventually the Fellowship took out all the goblins. However, Pippin was killed in the process. The game was a Good victory!

The cave troll is just not tough enough in the game, I'm giving him another wound next time. Also, I'm going to put some rubble on the floor which will serve as rough terrain for the Fellowship, but not for the goblins or cave troll, so that should liven the game up as well. But all in all, it was great fun, I love the rules (and I am not a GW fanboy by any stretch), and am looking forward to running this game again in the future.

Dungeon Crawl RPG Playtest
I've been working on a retro-inspired (not a retro-clone) set of tabletop fantasy rpg rules and wanted to test them out. I won't go into details about the rules, but here are a couple of pictures of the game. My plan is to run this dungeon (it's about 15 rooms total) at a convention as a rpg-lite type game. It is sort of like a cross between Heroquest and old-school theater-of-the-mind D&D in that it is played on the tabletop, but the actions of the characters are not really constrained at all, so they can do whatever their player describes.

I had to put the idol from the cover of the AD&D Players Handbook in the game, didn't I!? He looks too cool not to include. The thief in this case is climbing up on the brazier to disarm a trap on it before removing the gem eyes. If you do not disarm this trap, when you go to pry out the gem eyes the brazier shoots a huge blast of flame straight up burning the would-be tomb raider. You can see many of the heroes I completed yesterday serving as the PCs for the game.

The cave troll is standing in for a demon in the game (I didn't get the demon figure finished). The party managed to complete the dungeon with only the barbarian dying, so it was pretty successful.

3 comments:

Really awesome battle. Is that carpet for the stonework? Whatever it is, nice work.

The RPG-lite is a really good idea. Back in the day we dumped all of the D&D combat rules in favor of early Warhammer rules. Mooks got 1 wound, leaders and lower-level players got two, and higher-level players got three. It really worked well, as it turned out. I could see doing that again.

Thanks Dale. No it is 6mm thick craft foam cut into squares. Then I take a stipple brush (I think that is what it is called) and paint on a dark color, then a medium shade, and finally a light shade, making the circle of color smaller each time. Not too difficult and pretty quick to do.

Yeah, I am trying to put together rules that are a bit more tabletop than D&D and a bit more role playing than a set of miniature skirmish rules. A lot of folks like Savage Worlds for this but I am one of the few that does not. They are still a bit more complicated than what I am looking for. Very nice set of rules, just not exactly what I am looking for.